Motivation

Transfer rumours

Methodology

My measure of similarity in passing style

I’ve included the selected player’s statistics in both the plots as well to have some reference. I’ve excluded comparisons between the same match since that would lead to the distance between those performances all being 0 instead of telling us about the match to match variation in his game.

One thing to note is that this isn’t an overall similarity of two players but a similarity between the way the two players played in two paritcular matches. Depending on how we choose to go from a many matches to many matches comparison to a one player to one player comparison, we could end up with different conclusions. The many to many that I compare is the closest match that every player had for each of the selected palyer’s performance and look at that distribution. Players who have played in various roles that the selected player himself has played in, should have at least one match very similar to each of the selected player’s performances. Players who have played in some subset of roles that the selected player has played in but haven’t had to play in the some of the other roles will have some very similar points when the matches with the similar roles are compared, but also some points farther away for the matches where a similar role wasn’t played in. Getting from this many to many to the one to one is something I’ll talk about later after we’ve seen the numbers.

Results

Gabriel Jesus

Nicolás Otamendi

Kevin De Bruyne

Danilo100.5

Vincent Kompany

Benjamin Mendy

Riyad Mahrez

Ilkay Gündogan

Leroy Sané

John Stones

David Silva

Kyle Walker

Raheem Sterling

Sergio Agüero

Bernardo Silva

Fernandinho

Aymeric Laporte

Ederson